Star Tribune
Democratic group ‘instrumental’ to party’s winning streak in Minnesota governor races
Six days before the midterm election, Alliance for a Better Minnesota released its seventh and final television ad against Scott Jensen.
The Democratic-aligned political fund had already spent months and more than $13 million targeting the Republican governor candidate with a steady stream of ads replaying his past remarks promising to ban abortion. Its last ad criticized his tax plan, for good measure.
The group’s unyielding strategy against Jensen on abortion is now being given a hefty dose of the credit for his decisive defeat in the midterm election, one that allies and opponents alike say also laid the groundwork to deliver DFL-controlled state government in what historically should have been strong year for Republicans.
“People were particularly turned off by him saying it in his own words. That’s what you saw in the ads,” said ABM executive director Marissa Luna. “We knew that it was highly effective to pair that with the stories of those people who would be very negatively impacted by an abortion ban.”
The result is the culmination of more than a decade of work behind the scenes from ABM, whose messaging strategy helped turn a two-decade drought for Democrats in the governor’s office into a historic streak of victories. While little known to the broader public, ABM has become an unmatchable force in Minnesota politics, expected to more than double the spending this cycle from a handful of top Republican-allied campaign groups combined.
Minnesota Republicans fear they’ll continue to be shut out of the governor’s office until they can find an answer to ABM on the right.
“Republicans wouldn’t be obsessed with trying to find an answer if they didn’t do good work,” said John Rouleau, executive director of the Minnesota Jobs Coalition, a Republican-aligned political spending group. “They are smart folks and they have a lot of resources. That is a deadly combination in elections.”
Creating headwinds
ABM was founded out of the same low point for Democrats that Republicans find themselves in now. The 2006 election had delivered the party’s fifth loss in a row in the race for governor.
“There was a theory that we needed to do a better job on the progressive side of counteracting corporate money that was supporting Republican candidates and that we would have to work together to do that,” said Carrie Lucking, who served as ABM’s executive director from 2011 to 2014.
ABM was formed as an offshoot of the national group Progress Now, designed to collect resources and spend them on a highly researched messaging strategy. It gets most of its funding from allied PACs, which fundraise from unions and other traditional DFL donors, some with deep pockets like Rockefeller heiress Alida Messinger.
ABM’s first test case came in the 2010 midterm election, when it released an attack ad on GOP governor nominee Tom Emmer, then a state representative, who had sponsored legislation to soften some penalties for alcohol-related driving offenses.
ABM’s early ad, released in July, connected that legislation with past drunken driving-related charges on Emmer’s record through the eyes of a mother who lost her son in an unrelated accident with a drunken driver. Emmer narrowly lost the governor’s race to DFLer Mark Dayton, even as Republicans swept control of the Legislature.
Two years later, ABM worked to flip the GOP-led Legislature to DFL control and spent two cycles attacking Republican governor nominee Jeff Johnson. Early in the 2018 governor’s race, ABM targeted Tim Pawlenty, who was challenging Johnson for the GOP nomination in the primary. They viewed him as the tougher opponent and hoped to oust him before the general election.
Pawlenty lost the primary and Johnson was handily defeated in the 2018 midterm by then-DFL Congressman Tim Walz. That early targeting has become a hallmark of ABM’s strategy, and sets it apart from other political funds that don’t start spending until closer to Election Day.
“The stronger the headwind that your opponent is sailing into, the better your folks are going to do,” said Lucking. “The current is actually harder for them to swim in based on the narrative we’ve created.”
‘No way he could recover’
Even before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, DFL-aligned groups united on an aggressive messaging strategy attacking Republican candidates on abortion. ABM started putting out ads against the GOP field for governor in May and had abortion-related ads on the air against Jensen before he won the primary in August.
“That can be hard to accomplish with groups that maybe don’t have the same agenda,” said Luna. “But folks came together and saw this was an effective issue across the board.”
Jensen’s first ad — which didn’t air until after Labor Day — tried to counter ABM’s messaging by showing him holding his newborn grandchild and saying he wouldn’t try to change abortion laws as governor.
But “there was really no way he could recover,” said Tim Stanley, head of Planned Parenthood’s campaign operation in the region. “Their ads set the stage for our action fund’s massive field program to take advantage of the doubt that people had in their minds about Jensen.”
Even when some polls showed Walz starting to break away with a clear lead in the race, they “didn’t take their foot off the gas,” said Rouleau. “That can be a hard sell. Nobody wants to buy a 10-point win.”
ABM raised nearly $15.8 million to spend almost exclusively against Jensen, according to its final campaign finance report released before the general election. That number didn’t include a late infusion of several million dollars from the national Democratic Governors Association.
By comparison, the top PAC on the Republican side, which was spending to influence the attorney general’s race, raised $2 million with a late infusion of $500,000. Republicans either need to find funding to match ABM or they need to think about different messaging to counteract it, said Republican strategist Gregg Peppin.
“It’s not always the person who spends the most who dominates the message battles,” he noted, pointing back to Paul Wellstone’s effective low-budget campaign. “We just need to go in with our eyes wide open and figure out how to deal with that.”
ABM’s work doesn’t stop when the election is over, Luna said. It’ll now switch gears to help develop messaging strategies around policy and debates at the Capitol, with the goal to make “Minnesota more progressive and further progressive policies.”
With Democrats heading into complete control of government in January, Stanley said Planned Parenthood will partner with ABM to implement an outreach strategy as they push to codify abortion access into state law.
“They are instrumental to the progressive movement,” he said. “They’re really the straw that stirs that drink.”
Staff writer Jessie Van Berkel contributed to this story.
Not all of the interviews were negative; a fair amount of players and parents reported positive experiences with Randolph, some saying they never witnessed him belittling players.
“To me, he was fabulous,” one parent said, noting their child “blossomed” under Randolph.
Terch wrote he was not able to substantiate an allegation that Randolph received payments from the East End Hockey Boosters, although he did find “unusual financial management practices” by the booster club, including a misrepresentation to parents about the use of at least some of what they paid, a commingling of funds between events and “unorthodox” accounting practices. Several parents said they felt they had overpaid many times without explanation. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension began investigating the former East hockey booster club in 2023 for alleged embezzlement. The status of that case is unknown.
In response to the report’s release, Duluth Public Schools Superintendent John Magas said in a statement that he can’t discuss personnel matters, but the district takes all reports from students and families “very seriously.”
“Our primary goal is to ensure that students have the best possible experiences, both in the classroom and in extracurricular activities,” he said. “We are committed to thoroughly investigating any concerns brought to our attention and taking appropriate action” to maintain safe and positive learning environments.
St. Thomas Academy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gas prices would increase by as much as 75 cents per gallon in the Midwest, where most refined products come from Canada, according to Patrick De Haan, an analyst at GasBuddy. Overall, the Peterson Institute for International Economics said Trump’s tariffs would cost the typical household $2,600 per year; the Yale Budget Lab said in an estimate released Wednesday that the annual cost could be as high as $7,600 for a typical household. As a share of their income, the poorest Americans would pay 6 percent more with 20 percent tariffs, compared with 1.4 percent more for the richest 1 percent, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank.
“We’re not talking about caviar — these are things that people have to buy. They’re essentials,” said Neil Saunders, a managing director at the analytics company GlobalData.
Economists say it would take several painful years for alternative domestic producers to emerge for many goods. For instance, almost all shoes and 90 percent of tomatoes sold in the country are imported, according to the Peterson Institute. And the United States does not even have the climate necessary to produce many food items – such as coffee, bananas, avocados, to say nothing of Chilean sea bass – at the necessary scale to meet domestic demand, said Joseph Politano, an economic analyst who has written on the subject on his Substack.
Trump’s tariffs would also reverberate through Wall Street and global markets, inviting turmoil that would affect investors and companies worldwide. Those effects would probably be felt quickly.
During Trump’s first term, stocks fell on nine of 11 days in 2018 and 2019 that the United States or China announced new tariffs, according to a study this year by economists with the Federal Reserve and Columbia University. Comprehensive tariffs would cause a swift one-time jump in prices before reducing economic growth about six months later, according to economist David Page, head of macro research for AXA Investment Managers in London.
Many analysts are hopeful that a stock market panic would dissuade or prevent Trump from carrying out his plans. The investment bank UBS projected that a 10 percent universal tariff could lead to a 10 percent contraction in the stock market. U.S. multinationals are heavily dependent on foreign subsidiaries, and retailers, auto manufacturers and other industrial sectors would be hit the hardest, according to UBS. Chris McNally, an analyst at Evercore, said Trump’s 10 percent tariff plan could cause a more than 20 percent decline in General Motors’ earnings, with slightly smaller declines for Ford and Stellantis.
Star Tribune
On the Wisconsin-Iowa border, the Mississippi River is eroding sacred Indigenous mounds
Bear and other members of her tribe are serving as consultants on the project, as is William Quackenbush, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin, and his tribe. They also lead teams of volunteers to help care for the mounds, which includes removing invasive European plants and replacing them with native plants that reduce soil erosion.
Some are skeptical of this manmade solution to a manmade problem. There are some tribal partners who’ve expressed that the river should be allowed to keep flowing as it wants to, Oberreuter said. Snow also acknowledged that people have been hesitant about making such a change to the natural bank.
But, she pointed out, “The bank is (already) no longer what it was.”
When the berm is complete, Snow said, there’ll be a trail atop it that visitors can walk. That may help protect the mounds better than the current way to see them, which is to walk among them, she said.
The Sny Magill Unit has been part of Effigy Mounds National Monument since 1962, Snow said, but it’s not advertised like the rest of the park. That’s in part because there are no staff stationed there to properly guide people through the mounds. But if people visit respectfully, she believes it’s one of the best places to take in the mounds because it’s on a flat, walkable surface, unlike the rest of the park, which is on a blufftop.
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